Fewer than 2 million souls inhabit Austria’s capital, Vienna – hundreds of thousands less than a century ago, when the Austro-Hungarian empire finally expired. Which makes it all the more remarkable that every one of them seems to have crammed into the main hall of Vienna’s Hofburg imperial palace on an unseasonably warm evening in late February.

The grand 1000-square-metre Festival Hall is packed to the gills, the whole room suspended in a gauzy, pastel haze. The occasion is the 62nd Kaffeesiederball, or Coffeehouse Owners Ball; its theme – which presumably loses something in translation – “The fortune of the coffee game, lives inside the coffee house.” A steaming cup of coffee is stencilled in lights at one end of the room. Chess pieces and card pips run up the walls.

It’s 9pm and we are an hour or so into a nine-hour marathon that will peak at midnight with a quadrille, called like an American line dance, and peter out about 4.30am, an hour or so after the grandest of the city’s 2400 coffee houses, including the legendary Cafe Landtmann, will open specially to serve fading revellers dishes such as Schinkenfleckerl, an indescribably moreish ham pasta.

The Kaffeesiederball is a particular favourite, due to its quintessentially Viennese atmosphere – think Andre Rieu on hallucinogenics.

That last supper in turn marks the end of the almost 2000 hours of dancing that constitute Vienna’s annual ball season. In total, 450 events take place between November and February. Everyone in Vienna has a tribe, it seems, and every tribe a dance: from doctors, lawyers and police officers to bakers, florists and the season’s very own Oscars equivalent, the Opera Ball.

The 62nd Kaffeesiederball was held in Hofburg palace's Festival Hall in February.
Andi Bruckner

All up, more than 500,000 people attend those 450 events, three-quarters of them locals, generating €145 million ($236 million) in ticket sales. The Kaffeesiederball is a particular favourite, due to its quintessentially Viennese atmosphere – think Andre Rieu’s Forever Vienna DVD on hallucinogenics – and sheer scale.

The capacity crowd crammed into the Hall of Festivals for the ball’s official launch is only the tip of an iceberg as big as the Hofburg itself.

Across 16 halls and ante rooms, 3000 people kitted out in tuxedos, tails and floor-length gowns are already dancing to 14 bands (classical, jazz, rock), wilting over cocktails in the innumerable ante-room bars, or having their hair and make-up refreshed at a cosmetic pit stop that has sprung up under the stairs. Even that crowd is a fraction of the usual 6000 guests who attend, given part of the Hofburg is closed.

Inside the main hall, a surprisingly good orchestra cranks out a thunderous Carmina Burana, complete with cat-suited ballet dancers. As an even better tenor wrings the last notes from Nessun Dorma – a thrillingly sustained Vincerò – hundreds of debutant couples who have trained for months at local dance establishments for this moment finally begin to revolve around the floor.

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“Because the balls opened up beyond the royals and the nobles in the 19th century, they didn’t die with the monarchy,” an elegant ball-goer in her early 30s tells me in perfect English.

“When I was growing up it was more a curse than a blessing. We didn’t want to hear about Franz Joseph I and Sisi [Empress Elisabeth of Austria, his tragic, beautiful consort]. I always longed for a bit more dynamism. But now Vienna is more dynamic and people from around the world come here for that tradition.”

“Some things are different,” Thomas Schäfer-Elmayer, the Kaffeesiederball’s master of ceremonies and owner of Vienna’s most celebrated dance academy, the Tanzschule Elmayer, tells Sophisticated Traveller earlier in the day. “Balls used to have no programs – the guests were the entertainment – but more and more we get show programs. We have to be entertained.”

Standing in a mirror-lined classroom in the late morning, Schäfer-Elmayer is explaining what has changed since his grandfather, a cavalry officer, founded the school in the stables of a former aristocratic residence, next to the Spanish Riding School, exactly a century ago. The short answer, it seems, is everything and nothing.

The Austro-Hungarian empire may have evanesced with World War I; a city built to rule Europe’s second-largest empire may be stranded today in a country that’s not much bigger than Ireland; but the waltz, and the grand way of life it expressed, goes on. Indeed, it may even be on the rise in a world in which prestige has become masstige.

Dating from the 13th century, the grand Hofburg palace can accommodate thousands of ball-goers. Bernhard Luck

Between 200 and 600 students come to the Elmayer school each day to learn to dance, or to study the finer points of etiquette, which Schäfer-Elmayer teaches everyone from school boys to corporates. The school’s founder wrote the bible on the subject after World War II, and Schäfer-Elmayer’s parents updated it in the ’70s.

Since returning to Austria to take over at the end of the ’80s after a career in international management, Vienna’s current Lord of the Dance has written eight bestsellers on the subject. The most recent sold out in weeks in November. “I didn’t expect that,” Schäfer-Elmayer says. “We had to start a new edition.”

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What he is actually trying to do, between snatches of conversation, is teach a bunch of Australian journalists how to, if not exactly waltz, at least not endanger anyone else who’s trying to. Which turns out to be where etiquette first entered this picture.

Vienna offers a particular mixture of grandeur and savoir faire; old-world scale and assurance in a shrinking, ever-less-certain world.

The waltz – a hybrid of the French quadrille and Scottish highland fling – was daringly democratic in its day, Schäfer-Elmayer explains. Racy because it was closer and faster than the regal quadrille, and all that spinning made you dizzier than champagne; déclassé because the people loved it. Cafes had waltz rooms out the back. Balls at the Hofburg were an attempt at imperial-bourgeois outreach. Given the proximity involved, in every sense, rules had to be brought to bear.

And that is where Vienna still comes into its own as a destination: its very particular mixture of grandeur and savoir faire; old-world scale and assurance in a shrinking, ever-less-certain world.

Overnight stays in the city were up more than 6 per cent in 2018 to a record 16.5 million, almost double the previous record rise in 2017. Last year, The Economist Intelligence Unit declared it the world’s most liveable city, the first time a European city has ever taken out the top position.

Vienna doesn’t just appeal to the selfie generation, though it definitely does that: there are 30 pages on social media alone in Schäfer-Elmayer’s latest 500-page tome, which also defines 21 “European values”. “This is basic knowledge in our opinion,” he explains. “We wanted to contribute something to the question of ‘what are European values’ that has been very often discussed since 2015, when we had this big immigration in Austria.”

The imposing Kunsthistorisches Museum boasts a collection of 4 million artworks and objects.

It’s what Vienna flogs to all comers: that gauzy aura of certainty and celebration; soft, rather than hard-lit European values; opera, orchestras, Schnitzel, Sachertorte and Schinkenfleckerl. All of them weighty, substantial, enduring.

Tourists can acquire “the imperial flair of yesteryear” at the Imperial Shop in the Hofburg, which promotes itself as being “where Sisi would shop” and stocks Lobmeyr crystal, Jarosinski & Vaugoin silverware and Augarten porcelain. Or they can lose themselves among the originals of all those artefacts, preserved in the 12,000-square-metre backstage area that has furnished the imperial theatre that is Vienna for centuries.

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The Imperial Furniture Collection began life in the 18th century as a central depot from which to stage-manage the court’s annual migration between palaces, predominantly the Hofburg and Schönbrunn, the summer palace of the ruling Habsburg dynasty. It opened as a museum in 1924, displaying to the public the riches of their former masters alongside the world’s most extensive collection of Biedermeier furniture, imperial and stolidly middle-class rooms alternating in the upstairs displays.

All up, the collection numbers more than 7000 objects, from Sisi’s tragic little bed – as featured in the 1955 biopic Sissi (sic) starring the even more beautiful and tragic Viennese-born actress Romy Schneider, which plays on a screen beside it – to chandeliers and candelabras so enormous they require a six-metre-high storage room. Thousands of those objects, the daily furnishings of Austro-Hungarian state power, remain off limits to the public in green-doored garages built in the 1880s for carriages.

“Kennedy and Khrushchev sat on that at the Vienna summit in 1961,” a guide says casually when I ask about a large, white, wooden three-seater that grazes the ceiling. “It’s the same now. There were 150 guests at the banquet for Putin’s state visit last year and that required 15,000 objects from storage. We have 10 state visits a year, and ministerial and embassy events.”

The more understated style of Austria’s 32-year-old, right-wing chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, has apparently lightened that load slightly. But the Imperial Furniture Collection remains a repository of Austrian soft power, the tip of another iceberg, the endless spoils of empire spread across the city’s museum district.

The famous Aztec headdress at the Weltmuseum was once thought to have belonged to Moctezuma.

The Weltmuseum, on a flank of the Hofburg that formerly contained family and guest apartments, now houses a quarter of a million objects, most of them collected by Archduke Franz Ferdinand during his two-year circumnavigation of the globe at the end of the 19th century. His assassination in June 1914 would lead to the war that would end his empire.

As is often the case in Vienna, it offers those riches – which include 200 objects from James Cook’s travels and the stunning Aztec feathered headdress once thought to have belonged to Moctezuma – with a slight air of apology.

“It was a panic buy,” the guide says of the collection, “because Austria was too late in colonialism to have a great collection.” In 2013, the museum changed its name from the Museum of Ethnology – which “sounded a bit Nazi” – to “world” museum, and began “decolonising” the collection, dedicating itself to “investigating how people live”. The hoard at the Weltmuseum in turn pales in comparison with those of two nearby institutions: the Albertina, with its million-plus-strong collection of prints and drawings, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Only 3 per cent to 4 per cent of the latter’s 4 million artworks and objects – 95 per cent of them from Habsburg collections – are ever on show. But it’s a hell of a crust, from single, definitive works by the likes of Raphael, Caravaggio, Vermeer and Rembrandt to the world’s largest collection of tapestries, the best room of Velázquez royal portraits outside Spain, and the best room of Bruegel paintings anywhere.

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It’s probably a sign of the times that its most famous – or photographed – painting is the tiny, virtuosic Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, which the Florentine artist Parmigianino painted in 1523, aged 21 – a mannerist selfie for the ages.

The writer travelled as a guest of the Austrian National Tourist Office and Thai Airways.